Post 1875-1965 Scientism's "SHATTERED CONSENSUS" : esteem-lowering news for McKitrick & Michaels

    Don't you sometimes wish you could actually meet a "junior" Fellow from one of those long-winded think-tanks?
   Or maybe just a hail-fellow-well-met type of fellow?
    When everyone is a "Senior", no one is a "Senior", my mom used always say.
   Is bluster and bombast just something they mix in the Kool-Aid ?
   Anyway, where was I ?
   Oh yes, crying crocodile tears over the losses in the all-important self esteem department for those two white guys, Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels.

    There is indeed a "Shattered Consensus", or rather a Shattered Hegemony, as we political science types learned to say once we stopped reading with our fingers and breathing through our mouths.
   From about 1975 to about 1965 , by no coincidence about one lifetime for an upper middle class male who never got his hands dirty down on the shop floor, there existed a perfect harmony of hegemonies between those powerful within politics, economics, sciences and the intellectual arts: and they called it "The Cult of Scientism".
   Or sometimes : "The Cult of High Modernity".
   It didn't end exactly in 1945 with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, as is usually advertised, but it was quite wounded.
    Still it gamely hung on until all its generations' Professor Emerituses and Chairman of the Boards finally died - about the same time that all those late Sixties striking grad students got new jobs ----- as 1970s profs.
    I have never found any more faithful followers of the cult of Scientism then those who know nothing about 21st century science.
    I mean economists ,obviously in that dig - all those nobel prize winners recalling their childhood smatterings of of 19th century science, who believe that we can do very nicely without any natural resources at all. (Shout out to good old Robert !)
    It is this longing for the good old days of the untenured giving universal obedience to the dictums of academic Scientism, that I see as the engine behind the Deniers' animus.
    We don't step and fetch like the old days and they don't like it - all this guff about denying climate change is just eyewash : these denier boys really do believe the world is doomed - which is why they're backing free enterprise efforts to move the 1% to Mars.
   Moving to Mars - Mars Colonies - now that is one crack-potted scheme the Deniers never deny.....

We got the birth certificate , CATO : Denialism was birthed in America, more precisely in Wichita

    DENIERS are busy,busy,busy people, but among  all their other denials, they never hesitate to find time to deny that America could have possibly birthed the current president.
   They seem to feel that he is either the spawn of the Devil or the spawn of darkest Kenya ----and as part of the DENIERS' overall "Southern Strategy", either hallucination will work equally well at the ballot box.
   One thing they will never ever deny (or its bye-bye that life-sustaining greenback oxygen) is that the DENIER Movement was birthed in America - more precisely in Wichita Kansas's Koch-funded CATO INSTITUTE, back in 1974.
   Unfortunately for The-Fate-of -the-Planet, the rest of the world was too busy to notice.

   Too busy witnessing what they thought was the soon-to-be triumphant Environmental Movement, thrown up after the late 1973 spike in Oil Prices marked the end to Modernity and Scientism.
   "Wrong, wrong ,wrong", said the Koch bros.
    America might have temporally have left bucolic Kansas for the seductions of Big City Environmentalism, but they's be back - back to the land of the ruby red slippers.
    The Koch bros decided to devote a lot of their enormous wealth to 'Denying' their way back to "The Lost Hegemony of Scientism".
    Back to the the sort of science their dear old Dad had made his fortune in : HARD Science, Newtonian - Daltonian - Darwinian Science , not all this post-quantum gobbledygook.
    The pity was that the Kochs simply didn't get it : yes the old Scientism Hegemony of 1875-1965 was gone : that perfect harmony between political/economic and intellectual hegemonies.
    But it hadn't been replaced by a new green-looking hegemony.
    In the postmodern world of posthegemony, there was no overall Hegemony anymore.
    Scientism still held all the cards among the politically and economically powerful and among those middle-aged or older while the the new green vision had only captured most of the younger intellectuals and most of the younger scientists but only some of the younger voters.
    It was a sort of stand-off : Scientism was still in charge but its orders no longer went unquestioned.
   Now if there is ANYTHING a denier hates worse than being questioned, well I haven't yet discovered it.
    Spoiled as rotten as only upper middle class WASP male teens can be spoiled, their every whim has always been granted all their lives : from mom to wife to secretary to mistress.
    Their animus at having their thoughts questioned sharply, in public, by young whippersnappers, is - I believe - what fuels the DENIERS' energy and anger.
    And to think that all this global bile was birthed in that little ole sorta Mayberry town of Wichita, Kansas : truth is indeed crazier than fiction.....

Most effective DENIER message isn't a think-tank or a blog : its a song

     Or accurately a song industry: the one that keeps pumping out Nashville's road songs.
     I am thinking particularly of  Tim Nichols' "HEADS CAROLINA, TAILS CALIFORNIA" and "YOU AIN"T IN KANSAS ANYMORE" , as sung by Jo Dee Messina.
    God, how I love those songs: songs so infectious that they'd make a graveyard of old tombstones get up and dance a two-step.
    Yet I know I really shouldn't.

    They might seem innocent enough - just modern day variants of ole Huck Finn's decision to 'lit out for the Territories', keeping well ahead of Grecian aunts bearing Civilization.
    Ultimately though, they're DENIER MUSIC, in much the same way that Western novels and Hard SF are DENIER LIT.
     Unfortunately it is their same spirit that fuels every pollution-denying, wage&tax&safetystandards-moaning greedy SOB's decision to close his factory and head off to newer pastures where there are no unions, laws or taxes.
   When the smallest, poorest nation on Earth gets 'too expensive', too 'regulation-bound', too 'democratic', these greedy SOBS are just going to head off for PLANET B (Mars) --- only this time they'll leave the 99% behind.
    The new workers will all be robots and the planet will be privately owned - sorta like the way KOCH INDUSTRIES is already owned and operated today : only the KOCH BOYS will be running a gated planet, instead of just a gated company.
    I mention the Koch boys not of any particular sense of malice but because their company (seemingly the monetary archangel to every single denier worth funding) was founded in and is still housed in Wichita Kansas.
    "You Ain't In Kansas Anymore" plays off the famous line from Dorothy and "The Wizard of Oz" and off the general sense in America that the NEW YORKER magazine and its sophisticated ilk are precisely edited so as to not appeal to  people from Wichita.
   The addressee in the song tells the singer that he's from Wichita, a kinda 'Mayberry sort of town'.
      The singer already knows this, because after kissing the headlights out of him under the Hollywood sign, she cuddles close and whispers, out here we call it "ronel, not rodeo" : sonny, you're in the big fast megacity of LA - not in Kansas anymore.
   So Wichita has long been set up at the epitome of non-coolness or alternatively, as the home of decent law-abiding,God-fearing, Constitution-worshipping red-blooded Americans.
    The Koch boys see it as the latter, and in 1974 as Environmentalism blossomed after the Oil Spike, they choose this armpit of non-coolness to thumb their nose at what they thought was the NEW green Hegemony ,as they birthed the Cato Institute and the DENIER movement in Wichita.
    We will never ever understand or halt what the Kochs began, until we emotionally understand the power over all of us that Huck Finn and Joe Dee Messina's message has: otherwise as in the film "The Seventh Seal", we will all sing and dance our butts off, while driving happily in our gas-guzzler on an one-way trip into our graves.....

Nova Scotia oceans: meet the new (SOCIALIST) boss, same as the old (CAPITALIST) boss

     Growth-oriented governments of the left as well as the right are both equally deadly to Mother Nature.
     Both rape and pillage and deplete the Earth and then deny they are doing so.
     Just take the socialist government of Nova Scotia ----- please take it  !

     Elected for the first time ever, a few years back, it promised rural fishing communities that things would be different on its watch, over such matters as the process of consultation before any more projects of open pen aquaculture were approved.
    In fact the wannabe socialist premier (Darrell Dexter) was filmed, along with local MLA Vicki Conrad, telling a fishing community exactly that - a fishing community in the hometown (Queens County) where he grew up.
   A man won't lie in his own backyard now would he - anymore than a bear would poop in his own backyard now would it ?

    Well I have just been to see the world premiere of a new film on open cage salmon fishing (SALMON WARS) and a whole lot of unhappy voters in the film seem convinced that not only would Dexter lie in his own backyard but that he did just that.
    What happened ????
     I suspect : "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs".
     Oh no, not real jobs, jobs, jobs ---- but promises of jobs, jobs, jobs - hundreds of jobs in one photo-op-friendly location.
     There are lots of sustainable, earth-friendly,  aquaculture alternatives to open cage fish farming of carnivore fish --- alternatives that will provide as many or more jobs .
   But these jobs will be spread out and diffused - not in one great bloody big building labelled " 400 jobs right here folks - vote for me".
   Large mega-projects have always appealed to the ( ahem) less subtle political mind because the benefits are frankly so photo-op-able.
    Easier to sell "SHIPS START HERE" ---- not so easy for a timid premier to condemn open cage salmon fishing by explaining that under the harbour surface, under the beautiful open cage fish farm, "THE SHIT STOPS HERE" and will eventually kill the golden goose (wild lobster fishing in that same harbour) that has fed your family for 400 years.

   This premiere took place in the large auditorium at Halifax's Citadel High and I don't recall such a large Nova Scotian audience for an environmental movie -probably more people there than at some of last week's NDP provincial convention's plenary sessions. (V. Bad News that .)
   But this movie was 21st century digital (written and narrated very effectively by SILVER DONALD CAMERON along with a devastating cast of 100% rural accented folks) and so could be webcast around the world at the same time as it was shown, old style, in the province's capital city.
   In particular, it was simulcast, over the web, at four halls close to where the documentary was filmed - villages where proposed fish farm projects loom before local fisherfolk.
   The film is free and freely available and many people plan to show it over and over in living rooms and fire halls all across the province until every last rural NDP (socialist) voter throws their hands up in disgust and vows to stay home in the next election.
    This digital film will undo all the hitherto successful lobbying efforts of the industrial special interest groups in the big city capital in Halifax -undo it silently but effectively - in one rural kitchen and living room at a time.
    The mills of the rural voter grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine.
   Growth oriented capitalists and growth-oriented socialists should both be afraid - very afraid.....

"Within a year, you WILL have read Ozzie Zehner's 'Green Illusions' " - SVE

Ozzie Zehner

      I am practically salivating , waiting to get my hands on Ozzie Zehner's latest book, GREEN ILLUSIONS.
     In it he makes clear that we don't now, never have and never will face an energy crisis - as in 'too little energy'.
   Rather we face the effects of excessive energy use and adding solar panels and windmills, alone, will only make it worse - by expanding the energy supply and thus, in effect, lowering the cost of all energy - all energy as in coal and oil.

    So we can afford to use more and more and more - till the greenhouse gases kill us all.
   Rather like improving gas mileage in the 1980s, only to discover we let ourselves spent just as much as ever on gas per year - but got to drive a lot more miles out of our improved ,energy-efficient, new cars !
    So our real crisis is a consumption crisis - more particularly a urban planning-induced consumption crisis.
   Until we de-urban-plan our cities, towns (and yes even villages) so they look as they did 200 years ago or more (in fact, back into the mists of time) we will be forced to use too much energy - by design.
    Urban design.
    But yesterday's biggest cities were small and walkable (& bike-friendly) and we needed far less energy to live.
   Shops, work, school was much closer at hand. We rented our home and simply moved when we changed jobs - rather than just staying put and buying another car or a bigger car to deal with the change.
   I can assure you that you will be hearing a lot about Ozzie's book - from both the bad guys (Cato Institute and ad nauseum) and from the good guys, sites like Desmogblog - over the next year or so....